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Articles
What is natural about Natural Rights?
Do Natural Rights exist? Michael Birshan investigates one of the more persistent political assertions of the modern world in this prize-winning essay.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness…”
Thomas Jefferson, US Declaration of Independence, 1776
It is clear that Jefferson along with the other Founding Fathers believed that – in addition to all man-made rights – there is a body of rights which were not the progeny of civilisation and which have always existed and will always exist. These are the Natural Rights. They, as Tom Paine says, “appertain to man in right of his Existence.”1 Simply by being a human, one possesses these inalienable and immutable rights – regardless of the government, religion, or ethical system under which one lives.
There is, of course, another view: that there is nothing ‘natural’ about Natural Rights.
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